Tag: Young Engineer

Every year, Mother’s Day comes around and a few days before many of us scramble to get her the perfect gift at the last minute.

This year, we are encouraging our Play-Well students to plan ahead and through play, create an amazing gift for your mom that she will truly cherish.

We have provided below ideas and tutorials on a few gifts that you can build out of LEGO® materials. And if you need an added incentive to start building now, if you share what you are able to make with us, you could receive a LEGO® gift for your efforts.

Each summer, we love to inspire the next generation of engineers, scientists, inventors, and creators all through play and 20,000 LEGO® Pieces. So, we are excited to announce that our Play-Well LEGO-Inspired Summer Camps are now here. This year, we are offering camps in 29 states around the country.

On May The Fourth, 2017, Warwick Elementary Families and Play-Well TEKnologies collaborated to build three separate Star Wars Worlds. Those worlds included the Ewok Village, Cloud City, and the trenches of the Death Star. Here is what over 200 families were able to create in just two hours…

We were lucky enough to participate again in Adobe’s Field Trip for their families at their Utah, Seattle, and San Jose office. There were dinosaurs, Hula dancers, gliders, clowns, and of course, we brought the LEGO. Hopefully, we were able to inspire some future engineers in the process.

On Sunday, July 12th, we helped GLIDE and families in the Tenderloin neighborhood build a 7.5 LEGO Heart of their Glide logo for Sunday Streets. A huge reason we were able to build so much of the sign was because of the awesome volunteers from Twitter For Good. Thanks to everyone that helped make this idea become a reality. Check out some of the pictures from the event below:

We began the sign at 11 AM and we only had until 3:30 PM to complete it. (Picture Source: Leah from Twitter)

Kids from all around the tenderloin community came to help. Some simply got off their bicycles to help. (Picture Source: Leah from Twitter)

By 12 PM, we had much of the lettering done and the complete bottom done. (Picture Source: Leah from Twitter)

Here is the awesome designer of the sign, Marco, and Leah, one of the awesome volunteers from Twitter. Without their help, this would never have been completed. (Picture Source: Leah from Twitter)

Now, the unconditionally part of the sign needed to be built. (Picture Source: Alain McLaughlin from Glide)

We are getting closer. (Picture Source: Alain McLaughlin from Glide)

This was one of our phenomenal helpers. She was able to do a lot of the hard part of build, filling in the letters with LEGO. (Picture Source: Alain McLaughlin from Glide)

One interesting challenge of making a sign like this is that pressure is applied to both sides of the sign, so it is much harder to get LEGO into the middle. She was able to do it with some friends. (Picture Source: Alain McLaughlin from Glide)

Almost there. (Picture Source: Alain McLaughlin from Glide)

We even needed a few step stools to get those last pieces up at the top. (Picture Source: Adejire Bademosi from Twitter)

We did it! (Picture Source: Alain McLaughlin from Glide)

The heart will be displayed at freedom hall at Glide Memorial Church. (Picture Source: Dori Caminong)

Let’s just say the Glide staff was excited about it and the entire Sunday Streets event. Thanks for having us! (Picture Source: Alain McLaughlin from Glide)

World-Renowned LEGO Artist, Alice Finch, the creator of the 400,000 piece LEGO Hogwarts introduced students to the many technological advancements contributed by female scientists and engineers today at Play Well Northwest Activity Center. Children learned about these female scholars by experientially building LEGO models of their great inventions. This is Alice Finch’s kick-off event as part of a larger project to introduce a variety of women scholars to kids through a LEGO curation.

Play-Well TEKnologies and World-Renowned LEGO Builder Alice Finch, the creator of the 400,000 piece LEGO Hogwarts Castle, are hoping to change that. On Saturday, April 18th from 10:00 AM – 5:30 PM, Alice Finch (with a little help from Play-Well) will introduce students to the many technological advancements contributed by female scientists and engineers. Alice and Play-Well will do this by having children learn experientially through building LEGO models of these great female scholars’ inventions. This is Alice Finch’s kick-off event as part of a larger project to introduce a variety of women scholars to kids through a LEGO curation.

Why is this such an important issue to address? CNN recently reported that in the U.S., “just one in seven engineers are female, only 27% of all computer science jobs are held by women, and women have seen no employment growth in STEM jobs since 2000.” A group of women leaders in STEM fields surveyed by CNN presented these possible solutions to address this issue:

1. Recognize that the the toys and games that young girls play with mold their educational and career interests.

2. Introduce girls early to role models of other women in STEM.

3. Engage girls in STEM and keep them interested.

This workshop addresses all three of these solutions, providing students an opportunity to learn about female science and technology role models in an engaging way using LEGO. This initial event is a trial to see how much interest there is for this type of learning and subject matter… and if having this event sell out in a few hours in any indication, there is definitely a need for more of this type of education.

This look of wonder and amazement in our students is what we strive for in each of our classes.

A question was posed on the LEGO Foundation Ideas Conference Forum: How can we measure learning through play?

The background of the question was:

“Measurements of learning is currently driven by a discussion of standardized tests in schools, which comes with a risk of teaching to the test, and not focusing on the soft skills with children’s motivation for learning and lifelong outcomes. Who are measurements actually for? And how can we provide new ways of measuring the critical soft skills, like collaboration, creativity and critical thinking, at the same time as making them relevant for the everyday situations in the home, and practices in the classroom?”

We at Play-Well have been asking, answering and re-asking this question for the past 18 years. After teaching over 500,000 kids, we have come to a few truths about play:

You can get kids excited about learning through play.

Children absorb and remember information when they are fully engaged, especially through play.

While it cannot replace scholastic practice in the classroom, play can be used to successfully explain and exemplify complicated academic concepts.

We know that play is powerful. We see it every day in our classes and hear it from parents. One parent relayed a story to us about a kindergartener: after one of our classes, who went to the playground, slid down the slide, and said to himself, “wow, this slide has a lot of friction!”

So, how do we measure this knowledge? That is where it gets tricky. Not only because the goals of each class are unique and difficult to pin down, but also because it forces us to confront an uncomfortable truth: we shouldn’t measure play.

Do we undermine the self-direction of play through measurement?

The entire premise of play is that it is self-directed and open-ended. Kids might play to explore the world, solve problems, or express who they are. These are only a few of the reasons children engage in play, and each has its merits in creating a well-rounded child.

Our friends in Montessori education have been strong advocates for self-direction in education: children may choose an activity and work on that activity until they feel they have completed it. They are done when they believe they have completed it, without the interference of their teacher. They understand that self-direction empowers children and that confidence helps create life-long learners.

Any attempt to measure organic play limits the open-ended nature of it; and in doing so, we may unintentionally saddle children with adult expectations or ideas of what “success” is.

How effective would measurements on play be?

We could come up with metrics to measure some aspects of play, but we must ask ourselves: would the data we received be worth the potential harm created in collecting it?

Our most satisfying times in the classroom, as instructors, are when our students have epiphany moments. We know that we can create the environment for those opportunities to happen, but it is out of our control as to when they happen.

Let’s revisit the kindergartener experiencing friction on the slide. We had reviewed that term numerous times through playing that week, so at some point it resonated with him. How do you measure that? When did the connection between our class and the slide occur? Did he have the epiphany on the slide or somewhere else? Does it matter? Furthermore, in peppering the child with questions attempting to solve the mystery, we ruin the positive association that child had with learning about friction. In the journey from qualitative play to quantitative measurement, the true magic of play will be lost in translation. It will fall short of what is possible if we just allow kids to explore the world for themselves, at their own pace, and trust that learning will happen.

A teacher in the U.S. recently wrote a resignation letter, stating that she needed to step down because she believed her profession no longer existed. With so much of her job being about standardized tests and constant measurement, her ability to actually be a teacher, allowed to play and experiment to get her kids excited by learning, was gone. By forcing common standards of teaching in the U.S., the powers that be had stifled this teacher’s ability to do her job in a way that spoke to her children.

In the play setting, who is the better teacher? The adult or the child?

So, given all the risk, why would we evaluate play or use play as a measurement tool? We love our children and we recognize play as nourishment for young minds. We want to support that in any way possible and we want that support to be based in peer-reviewed study. This is where we hit the crux of the questions posed: who are measurements actually for?

In simplistic terms, measurements are for adults, and play is for kids.

If you were to ask a child at play, “are you having fun?” She would say, “yes.” If you asked her to articulate why she is having fun, you’ll probably hear, “I don’t know, it just is.” She might not fully understand why she does what she does, or what she is learning when she plays, but it is happening. Children submit their bodies, their minds and their spirits to whatever creative world they are traveling through when they play and they do so without judgment or expectation. You can see it in the way their limbs hang when they are being carried to bed after a long day of play: that child gave all of himself to his adventure today. The fullness with which children embrace and indulge in their experiences is something from which we adults can learn. So let us take an opportunity to embrace the process of play without analysis of the results. Can play be a valuable learning tool or method of measurement? Yes. How can we prove it? We shouldn’t bother trying. Or as a child would say, “it just is.”

What will save us? Perhaps Play.

Ken Robinson, in his lecture about schools killing creativity, explains how the musical Cats almost didn’t happen. The most successful musical of all time only happened because the creator was pulled out of a regular classroom and identified by a teacher as being a dancer, instead of someone who just couldn’t sit still in class. Ken explained that world-changing potential is sitting in our classrooms, but we need to allow kids to play if they are going to understand who they want to be. We as adults must exercise some restraint and allow children to experience that process uninhibited by our desire to understand it. We must treat play as sacred and do all that we can to keep it whole. This is how we can advocate for children and also for ourselves. Because the next great solution, the life-changing invention, the cure for cancer–these things won’t come from a mind that can merely think outside the box; they will come from a mind that thinks the box doesn’t exist.